This is a writer who uses her whole body.
This artistic maturity is beautiful and rare.
— Poet Jenny Factor
This artistic maturity is beautiful and rare.
— Poet Jenny Factor
|
Remember Rwanda... is powerful and necessary. Chaiken is plumbing both personal and cultural trauma, and using story
to heal both. It’s stunning. It took my breath away. — Novelist and Memoirist Gayle Brandeis |
Remember Rwanda: a rainbow of colored glass, like teeth
Click on the photo for a link to KIGALI HOTEL, excerpted
from a forthcoming book-length memoir about the time
I spent in Rwanda, where I served as international creative director for the 20th commemoration of the 1994 genocide.
and a handful of poems
|
I’m not Sioux
Socorro, who is Sioux, says she walks Skid Row streets lined with tents, shopping carts with all their stuff. “There but for the grace …,” Socorro says. She was a drinker, a user, thrower-away of self. Her people got thrown away. We sit outside Mi Tierra Mexican coffee Five bucks a cup, celebrating. Her sister's on chemo, had a good enough day for Socorro to slip away. The sweet steam, bitter sip takes me back to when I walked like her, but East Village streets, only enough bread for a hot drink. I warmed myself in Saint Marks bookstore stacks because the furnace in my basement storefront was perpetually busted. Runaway from suburban roots, I pulled my stuff from perch to perch in a metal trunk on wheels with a green vinyl leash through slushy streets. Not Sioux, but Jew. Not Survivor or even child of. But flowing through the stream of my blood, my family, my familiars, are slippery-slidy escapers of Eastern Europe, the Lower East Side. Ancestors who have no face with shame that has no name, no story. Stalking me that winter on slushy streets, a gaunt crone, long-legged like a crane, grey wrapped, picked through trash, curled up at night in the next-door stoop. People pointed. There were whispers: "She's the one who shot Andy Warhol." [That’s all I knew then, pre-Internet, pre-movie with Lili Taylor.] She was out of jail, living on the street. On my street. Winter. Sandals. Ankles swelled up like crusty trunks of trees, toenails black as the filth behind her ears. Angular. Black hair frosted with kinks of grey piled high upon her head. Classy, regal blooded, like me. Google now gives her a name, a Wiki-thread of story: Valerie Solanas. Andy wouldn’t produce her play “Up Your Ass.” So she set out to kill him. As would anyone off their rocker for whatever reason. I sure would. More than twice my age at the time, she was the age of my mother, my much-older sister, my future me. Sprung from her cage, night after night that winter that went on, for fucking ever, me and the woman I know now as Valerie Solana shared Saint Marks stacks. It was warm there. It was open late. Keeping distance to avoid the stench of her, I was rapt by her, felt the creepy crawl of my legs blowing up, becoming her legs, maggots between my toes. Her fine profile etched still in my brain, she’s long gone, [her obit in the Times] and yet, “There but for the grace …” I thought, I think, at a time when, no, my dear Socorro, there was, there is so little grace. |
There’s the Mother and the Mother of the Mother and the Child of the Mother who is no Mother will not be a Mother will not pass on the Curse. If only, the Child thought as a child, if only I were Nicaraguan, if only we’d lived through the Holocaust. It would all make sense. 
Whirring I linked arms in dark places with those who have seen the arms of those they love hacked off hearts cut out eaten I seem intact wake up walk the yellow dog swab the bathroom sink say good morning to the bus driver and mean it Day’s end I lay myself down grateful for warmth in winter belly as full as I want it to be teeth clean face creamed comfort of that close-by aging hound a loyal loving man Despite the little blue pill despite the hypnotic lull playing through the buds in my ears promising wholeness power and restorative rest This whirring I do late in the night |
